How Gogol's ‘Old World Landowners’ Is Made: The Ironic Weave Unravelled

Most commentators regard Gogol's ‘Old World Landowners’ (‘Starosvetskie pomeshchiki’) as an idyll into which elements of the tragi-comic intrude, but there is an overwhelming consensus that the story's iconic opening passage, which describes the rural setting and introduces the protagonists, still presents a virtually unbroken idyll. The present article sets out to show that the anomalies critics have occasionally discerned already here are not sporadic but sustained and programmatic, forming the basis of a highly subtle, intricately woven and ultimately definitive narrative irony in which the narrator comes to be seen as a profoundly disturbed urban snob who is praising the sentimental rural visions that haunt him against his better judgement.